One song is usually enough. A memorial slideshow runs four to six minutes, which is roughly the length of a single piece of music, and a slideshow that ends when the song ends feels finished in a way that a fade-out never does.
One, in most cases. Four to six minutes holds a room that is already tired, and that is one track. Two songs suit a longer film — eight to ten minutes, or a life with a clear before and after, a childhood and then a family. Three is almost always too many: by the third change of music people are listening to the playlist instead of looking at the photographs. If the slideshow is playing on a loop at a wake or a reception rather than being watched once at a service, that rule relaxes and a short playlist is fine.
Slow, but not a dirge. Something with space in it — piano, strings, an unhurried voice — sits under photographs without competing with them. Watch the lyrics: a song can be perfect for forty seconds and then arrive at a line that lands badly in a room full of people who are barely holding on, and instrumental versions exist for exactly this reason. Watch the build, too. Anything with a big crescendo pulls attention to the music at the moment you want it on a face.
They fall into four groups. Standards that have carried a lot of funerals — "Somewhere Over the Rainbow", "What a Wonderful World", "Time to Say Goodbye". Hymns, where faith is part of it — "Amazing Grace", "How Great Thou Art", "Be Still My Soul". Classical and instrumental, which is the safest ground when opinions differ — Pachelbel's Canon, Clair de Lune, Elgar's Nimrod. And then the one that was actually theirs: the record they always had on, the song from their wedding, the thing they sang badly in the car. That last group beats the other three almost every time.
This is the most common place to get stuck, and it is usually because you are trying to find a song that is worthy of the whole person. No song is. Lower the bar deliberately: instead of asking what music sums them up, ask what was playing in the house. Ask the person who knew them longest, not the person organising the funeral — they are rarely the same person, and the second one is too busy to remember. If it still will not come, choose something instrumental. Nobody has ever objected to a piano.
Match the number of photographs to the song rather than the other way round: at four to five seconds each, a four-minute track carries roughly fifty photographs and a five-minute one carries sixty. Have the actual audio file if you can, not just a streaming link — venue wifi fails, and it always fails at the worst moment. Check the volume in the actual room if you get the chance, because a laptop that sounds fine in a kitchen disappears in a hall with forty people in it. And if the piece you want is a commercial recording being played at a private service, that is ordinary personal use; a video you intend to publish publicly afterwards is a different question worth asking about first.
Anything with a hard beat, which fights the pace of still photographs. Anything the family is split on — the point is not to make a statement. Songs so closely tied to another event, a wedding or a first dance, that they hijack the moment. And fading a track out mid-verse because the slideshow has run out: it reads as unfinished, and people notice. If the song is longer than the film, cut the film to end on the last chord instead.
Choosing the music is the decision people agonise over; gathering, repairing and ordering the photographs is the work. That part can be done for you — damaged and faded pictures repaired, black-and-white ones coloured, every photograph given gentle movement and set to the track you chose, finished in 30 to 90 minutes.
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